K-Space at TRECVid 2007

In this paper we describe K-Space participation in TRECVid 2007. K-Space participated in two tasks, high-level feature extraction and interactive search. We present our approaches for each of these activities and provide a brief analysis of our results. Our high-level feature submission utilized multi-modal low-level features which included visual, audio and temporal elements. Specific concept detectors (such as Face detectors) developed by K-Space partners were also used. We experimented with different machine learning approaches including logistic regression and support vector machines (SVM). Finally we also experimented with both early and late fusion for feature combination. This year we also participated in interactive search, submitting 6 runs. We developed two interfaces which both utilized the same retrieval functionality. Our objective was to measure the effect of context, which was supported to different degrees in each interface, on user performance. The first of the two systems was a ‘shot’ based interface, where the results from a query were presented as a ranked list of shots. The second interface was ‘broadcast’ based, where results were presented as a ranked list of broadcasts. Both systems made use of the outputs of our high-level feature submission as well as low-level visual features

Direct kernel biased discriminant analysis: a new content-based image retrieval relevance feedback algorithm

In recent years, a variety of relevance feedback (RF) schemes have been developed to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Given user feedback information, the key to a RF scheme is how to select a subset of image features to construct a suitable dissimilarity measure. Among various RF schemes, biased discriminant analysis (BDA) based RF is one of the most promising. It is based on the observation that all positive samples are alike, while in general each negative sample is negative in its own way. However, to use BDA, the small sample size (SSS) problem is a big challenge, as users tend to give a small number of feedback samples. To explore solutions to this issue, this paper proposes a direct kernel BDA (DKBDA), which is less sensitive to SSS. An incremental DKBDA (IDKBDA) is also developed to speed up the analysis. Experimental results are reported on a real-world image collection to demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the traditional kernel BDA (KBDA) and the support vector machine (SVM) based RF algorithms

Semantic spaces revisited: investigating the performance of auto-annotation and semantic retrieval using semantic spaces

Semantic spaces encode similarity relationships between objects as a function of position in a mathematical space. This paper discusses three different formulations for building semantic spaces which allow the automatic-annotation and semantic retrieval of images. The models discussed in this paper require that the image content be described in the form of a series of visual-terms, rather than as a continuous feature-vector. The paper also discusses how these term-based models compare to the latest state-of-the-art continuous feature models for auto-annotation and retrieval

K-Space at TRECVID 2008

In this paper we describe K-Space’s participation in TRECVid 2008 in the interactive search task. For 2008 the K-Space group performed one of the largest interactive video information retrieval experiments conducted in a laboratory setting. We had three institutions participating in a multi-site multi-system experiment. In total 36 users participated, 12 each from Dublin City University (DCU, Ireland), University of Glasgow (GU, Scotland) and Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica (CWI, the Netherlands). Three user interfaces were developed, two from DCU which were also used in 2007 as well as an interface from GU. All interfaces leveraged the same search service. Using a latin squares arrangement, each user conducted 12 topics, leading in total to 6 runs per site, 18 in total. We officially submitted for evaluation 3 of these runs to NIST with an additional expert run using a 4th system. Our submitted runs performed around the median. In this paper we will present an overview of the search system utilized, the experimental setup and a preliminary analysis of our results